Docs and musings

Changing names honoring Confederate generals and removing memorials, apart from a few practical challenges, is relatively easy. Monuments can be moved into museums, and names on street signs can be changed. (At W&L, the four-ton statue of Lee napping in battle dress with sword at hand is too much to move, but Lee Chapel was renamed University Chapel.)

But to get rid of the world’s largest Confederate monument at Stone Mountain? That’s hard to imagine. How much dynamite would it take, and what about the optics? “Erasing history” would come to mind unbidden. . .

For full story, go to Salvation South.

Moving in silent desperation
Keeping an eye on the Holy Land
A hypothetical destination
Say, who is this walking man?

The baritone of James Taylor bewitches with a melody that long ago wormed into my brain for keeps. It sleeps, then can’t you just feel the moonshine? It awakens, silent except in my head, a deep emotion of fall in the mountains on a gravel road. That’s James Taylor, like an older brother I never met.

Now that we’ve settled into this condo, Libby lets me know that the sleek little Audio-Technico turntable she bought can also be used with the speaker system I’ve used for streaming Pandora and NPR. Out of the vinyl records we’ve saved, but haven’t played in an eternity, I pull out James Taylor’s 1974 “Walking Man.” It’s perfect, better than I remembered.

Every song on this album is a gem, the work of a craftsman at a good time in his long career, making these 10 songs that were not “hits” but perfect in their own way. Not only that. These are also poems. I declare that as one who has studied poetry, meter-scanned Virgil, and knows the bad from the decent and deep. These are fine and deep and mean a lot to me.

Take those first lines. “Silent desperation” is a riff on Thoreau’s “lives of quiet desperation,” of course, but maybe so is Holy Land, which Thoreau notes was the root of “saunter,” a le Sainte Terre, in his  essay on walking.

Who is this walking man? He’s the ghost spirit of American restlessness, Billy the Kid, whom Conrad Aiken associated with the solitary self-exile from the Puritan commonwealth, William Blackstone of Rhode Island, in a long poem, “The Kid.” It’s also a recurring figure in James Taylor songs, the country road wanderer abandoning home and farm, a bit of himself on heroin or in therapy between Stockbridge and Boston. Or sometimes it’s his father, imagined as a n’er-do-well who left home. “Pappy’s come to rambling on/ Stumbling around drunk/ Down on the farm.”

In fact, Dr. Isaac Montrose Taylor was the dean of the University of North Carolina Medical School. I recently went back to Carolina (not just in my mind) and walked Morgan Creek Trail, a city park along the creek where the Taylor boys used to play. The highway bridge over Morgan Creek has been named The James Taylor Bridge. The house where the boys grew up, worth well over a million now, is gated and behind a bamboo stand in a wooded neighborhood of modernist houses.

Country songs usually split open an adage or cliché for double entendre, “I’ve got friends in low places.” James Taylor does that a lot in the “Walking Man” album, but tightly and dinging with inner assonance.

Most everybody’s got seeds to sow
It ain’t always easy for a weed to grow, no
So he don’t hoe the row for no one
Oh for sure one’s always missing
And something’s never quite right
Ah, but who would want to listen to him
Kissing his existence good night.

His rhyme schemes are well-tooled, not just couplets or A-B, A-B, but sometimes A-B-C, A-B-C as in “Me and My Guitar.” “I hear horns/ I hear voices/ I hear strings/ Seems I was born/ with too many choices/ Now what am I going to do with all these extra things.” Even using the simple Shakespearean form of A-B, A-B, loosely, he upends the story of Odysseus being recognized by his dog’s sense of smell. From “Hello Old Friend,” about returning to the Taylor compound on Martha’s Vineyard:

Little dog David I must look like a fool
I should’ve remembered you’d be forgetting my smell, well
Give me a week or two to recapture my cool
I’ve got stories to tell
About how I snatched the devil’s catch
And outran the hounds of hell.

“Walking Man,” the album, has one pop song cover, “Ain’t No Song,” and one Chuck Berry cover, “The Promised Land.” These may be the least poetic, though the first one succeeds because it’s a riff on songwriting (“Not even this song’s gonna tell you the way that I feel”) and the other, to me, because it encodes the Black experience in America – the Great Migration and the Freedom Ride bus that “left us all stranded in downtown Birmingham.”

The other songs I would put into three categories, three dark lodes that James Taylor mines for verbal gold.

One is depression. A girl, I assume, is sinking into acute melancholy that only the singer can enter with her, because he’s been there. Or maybe he is the one who is sinking. Maybe the depression is not another person, but his interior “love.” The experience is like love because it binds the two, or maybe just the lonely self with itself, silent and secret. “Daddy’s Baby” begins: “Daddy’s baby what’s got you thinking/ What’s got you sinking so low/ Is there something I should know/ Something new to you.” And it ends, mysteriously: “So I called my love my home.” The same sweet sadness finds its end in “Fading Away”:

Well, it’s hard to find a label
For this feeling in my bones
That this is all a make-believe
But my cards are on the table
And their ain’t nothing up my sleeve
And here I thought I was a thinking man
But I’m a shrinking man, I’m sinking man
I’m fading, fading away

The second category is the seductive nature of rock. In “Me and My Guitar” he sings, “If he can’t go to heaven/ Maybe I don’t want to go, Lord.” Where does this beguiling music come from? Africa. “See the white man sailing his ship upon the sea/ Watch the white man shackle the black man to a tree/ To the invader go the fruits of war/ He misses home and his boots are sore/ He has not got no roots no more/ He comes for your gold/ Watch out for your soul” (“Rock ‘N’ Roll is Music Now”). This fruit of war – the rebellion of the post-war baby boom – becomes even more haunting in “Migration” with its slow Vox Humana.

Mystery muse, how I hunger for an answer
Unsung song, how I long to play the changes
Hidden rhythm haven’t I always been your dancer
Sacred secrets of the meaning to my dreaming. Migration.

The mysterious “slow vibration” of migration leads to the third theme – decline and fall. This is not just the singer “Fading Away” (“the circles in my mind/ They have been winding slowly down/ . . .I’m seizing up, I’m freezing up”). It’s the great collapse of the West, of our system of extraction and exploitation breaking down. “Let It All Fall Down” is a straight-forward prayer to admit we did this to ourselves and to be as gentle as we can be as we welcome the end.

. . at least we might show the good sense
To know when we’ve been wrong
And it’s already taken too long
So we bring it to a stop
Then we take it from the top
We let it settle on down softly
Like your gently falling snow
Or let it tumble down and topple
Like the temple long ago.

In the early 1970s, I was sure I had the good sense at 21 to know when we’ve been wrong. I wanted to see the machinery stop, let it all rest. Being strapped in an airliner seat during a landing, when it reverses its engines and roars and shakes to try to slow down from 200 to 20 mph, that’s what I thought it would feel like to get back to nature. This song contained a poem that said what I was feeling then. And as Robert Frost says of true poetry, like metal on the tongue, it never loses its freshness.

“Energy” has many meanings. But there’s one way to see it as everything. Energy is Man’s discovery of fire, how civilizations ate (from hunter gathering to farming), the population-exploding Industrial Revolution, and the cause of Gulf Wars. It’s fossil fuels and solar power. It’s the photosynthesis of forests and flowers, as well as our daily energy and body temperature.

I see this big picture because I covered energy as a beat in Rhode Island in the early 80s, taking a course on it from a physics professor at Brown and reading experts like Daniel Yergin and Amory Lovins. I’m no expert, but I covered the problems of trying to build the Seabrook nuclear power plant – not just the protests but Wall Street shunning it due to problems of safety and security. I covered deregulation. It’s complicated. As I obsess now over the need for the world to deal with climate change, I admit it’s complicated and confusing, even to me.

So with some relief, I read an Ezra Klein column in the Times dividing the big picture into three parts, like Caesar did Gaul. He calls these three “goals society can have for its energy usage.”

The first is to use less. You can recycle, go vegetarian, and bike-ride to work. Or like me, you might drift into lifestyle changes based on tax credits (we bought an electric Nissan Leaf), and less income (with my retirement, we sold our big old house and moved into a condo).

The second type of energy goal, in Klein’s big picture, is doing the same things we do, but with less fossil fuel. De-carbonization. Wind, solar, maybe even small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). That’s the goal of Biden’s successes and the latest climate summit in Egypt. The change is huge, but what we do with the energy is maintain the status quo.

And for the third and last energy goal. . .meet the Jetsons. It’s about entirely new sci-fi sources of “clean and abundant energy” that would supposedly open up whole new ways of living, the way coal, gas and oil improved everything (except maybe what we lost in our humanity).

A little understanding about energy seems pretty important, and generally lacking. For a little understanding, I have come to some basic principles about energy. One is that there’s no free lunch. Batteries in our Leaf are heavy as hell and take the extraction of all kinds of dirty chemicals from faraway places. And it’s hardly burning less fossil fuel if the power is from coal- or gas-burning power plants.

Decarbonization is incremental, always with downside costs. But let’s do it.

Another principle is that, paradoxically, energy isn’t everything. It’s “necessary but not sufficient” in defining human life, the great mystery that includes language, religion, meaning, insanity, love, baseball and so on.

And now I have one more simple principle. Of the three “energy aims” Klein outlines, none of the three is bad, unless it sees the other two as bad.  “Abundant, clean energy” would actually be a terrible thing because of human nature, but impossible because of the laws of physics. We need all three goals – using less, decarbonizing and big breakthroughs – and a better grasp of what we’re up against.

Common Good Governing began in 2017 with a dream. That is, literally, “a dream,” a bad dream that Lester Levine woke up with about a week after Trump won the Election of 2016. It was also just after Levine’s first grandchild was born. Having a grandson put Levine in a dark mood of worry about the future of America. Trump’s election was, as for other intellectuals, a shock and dismay for him. Levine, a retired professional in organizational change (“I’m a behaviorist,” specializing in how social signals change people’s collective behavior) thought about that dream. It must have something to do with how Americans vote, and about the future world that his grandson would inherit.

In the dream, he was in a foreign land that had just overthrown decades of dictatorship. In the vacuum that followed, the people were desperately looking for a democratic system that might protect them from the next dictator to emerge. They studied democratic systems around the world, going back to the Greeks, and found the most interesting to be America’s. The principles of the Founding Fathers seemed to be good: freedom of expression, the rule of law not men, an ideal of individual rights and fairness. And the system seemed resilient and sustainable, surviving and strengthening through partisan battles and a Civil War. But then, they discovered, something went wrong. Around the year 2000, the nation became increasingly divided by its party loyalties. It seemed the system was breaking down, as it did for other humane systems in the past. Then he woke up.

Sitting with me at an outdoor Caribou Coffee table in Chapel Hill in the gloom of a late gray afternoon in December, Levine described how his quiet little movement developed from there. He learned that an organization had been started in 1948 that seemed to want what he wanted – elected representatives who worked for good governing (“Goo-Goos” was the dismissive name for such reformers in the Progressive Era) instead of hack politicians. The National Committee for an Effective Congress (NCEC) was started by Eleanor Roosevelt and some Democratic allies. Today, with an office in Washington DC, it makes available detailed analysis of voting behavior to promote election of progressive Democratic candidates. Levine drew on parts of this organization’s mission, but not the part favoring “progressive Democratic” candidates. He wanted an approach that favored pragmatic problem-solving candidates. Of course they were likely to belong to a party, and probably the Democratic Party. But Levine was looking for values and principles higher than party.

He began putting together CommonGoodGoverning (CGG). He avoided the internet, so you can’t Google it. (We began our talk over hot tea as a couple of over-70 geezers kvetching about how kids are being damaged by their social media trance; Levine’s now-7-year-old grandson is a particularly bitter case for him.) CGG has a PowerPoint (he calls it “our deck”) he’ll send you by email on request, and a newsletter he emails monthly to 1,610 interested subscribers. It’s the most non-aggressive political email I’ve ever seen, never asking for donations and happy to be unsubscribed-to. “Hopeful American Democracy Fixers,” he writes in each newsletter from the top. “If you don’t want any more monthly updates, just hit reply and say ‘no more.’” One of the striking tactics of CGG is how it operates below the radar.  Levine asked me not to use his name if I wrote something for a publication. (I don’t consider this measly blog a meaningful publication). Why? “I don’t have time” to be bothered by the attention. His secret goal is for CGG to be discovered in six or eight years when a few unlikely candidates explain their surprising wins to a Washington Post reporter by mentioning the support they got from CommonGoodGoverning. But he won’t seek that publicity.

Here’s what CGG has done for every two-year election, starting in 2018. First, it looked for fresh candidates running for open seats who met its criteria. According to the PowerPoint deck, they must be:

• Anchored by principles that a majority of American voters agree on, not issues, policies or ideologies
• Focused on problems that a majority of American voters, Republicans, Democrats and Independents, are concerned about (e.g. healthcare costs, veteran services, immigration, responding to climate change, etc.)
• Seeking to replace politicians with public servants/servant leaders

CGG then narrowed the number of these candidates down to a few dozen, who were approached with offers to help (not endorse or donate to). Those who responded were interviewed and chosen for support.

Two years ago, Levine called me up when he read an op-ed I had in the Roanoke Times about my experience teaching for a term at a North Carolina community college. (I was a tenured associate professor at a top liberal arts college in Virginia on leave for the fall). I was intrigued by his project. This year, I volunteered to help. Here’s what CGG volunteers do:

• Research on voter opportunities specific to their district
• Research on “truthful” opposition research
• Active brainstorming on specific campaign challenges
  • Ongoing sharing of lessons learned from past/current campaigns

They don’t donate money, and they don’t leave home. Levine said members of CGG from outside the Chapel Hill area have never come to meet him as I did, at least not since the pandemic.

My assignment for the ’22 campaign was to find minority “potential influencers” in certain small towns and counties. I sent the information to Levine to send to the campaigns for four of their seven chosen candidates for the general election. This was to operationalize Levine’s behaviorist theory that peer-to-peer networking is the most powerful way to win votes. Being a former journalist, I enjoyed the assignment, using the internet to compile names and contacts (emails or phone numbers) of up to a dozen locals (chairs of library boards, arts councils, Hispanic Chambers of Commerce and such) in targeted areas of four congressional districts: Colorado’s 3^rd, Arizona’s 2^nd, Iowa’s 2^nd and New Jersey’s 2^nd. This, after I had failed to be any help for CGG’s candidate Katie Dean, a working-class auto-repair owner in western North Carolina who lost the Democratic primary to a more liberal candidate. I also liked this other candidate, but as a Brown- and Harvard-educated minister in a same-sex marriage, Jasmine Beach-Farrara predictably lost to the Republican in Mark Meadow’s conservative district by 9.5 percentage points.

This year, CGG had fewer candidates than in the two previous elections. For the primary, it had a different group of seven candidates. All but one of those lost (including two Republicans). For the general election, all seven CGG candidates lost, some by a mile. But one came very close, and I was glad it was the one I helped on the western slope of the Rockies in Colorado. Gun-toting Republican Lauren Boebert of Rifle, Colorado, squeaked by with about a 500-vote margin.

In his after-action newsletter, Levin blamed gerrymandering and the fact that four of the seven CGG candidates were running against incumbents this year, the first time CGG had backed challengers to incumbents. That was discouraging, but he signed off as always on his newsletter, “Onward.”

Common Good Governing has already helped elect six members of Congress. Four of them joined a bipartisan Problem-Solvers Caucus that is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, co-chaired by a Democrat and a Republican.  

This goo-goo approach may seem naïve or over-matched by the grim options of mass violence or mass cynicism. But with a narrow Republican takeover in the House, and an equally narrow Democratic majority in the Senate, it’s a serious alternative to a serious problem. George Packer put it this way in his article in the Atlantic last December, “Are We Doomed?”

There is a third scenario, though, beyond mass violence or mass cynicism: a civic movement to save democracy. In an age of extreme polarization, it would take the form of a broad alliance of the left and the center-right. This democratic coalition would have to imagine America’s political suicide without distractions or illusions. And it would have to take precedence over everything else in politics.

The Roanoke Times occasionally runs short vignettes from readers under the heading “Cornershot.” I had a couple of these published that I’m saving here. Condensation is something you learn from doing a lot of longer writing.

Tranquil Moments Along the Blue Ridge Parkway
Dec. 21, 2019

By some stroke of luck, one of our sons has bought a farm on the Blue Ridge Parkway across from an overlook that faces the North Carolina Piedmont. We have been visiting every week this fall, staying in a little house temporarily without water or bathroom, like in the old days.

The Blue Ridge Parkway’s purpose is not transportation but to reveal the “charm and interest of the native American countryside,” wrote Stanley Abbott, the parkway’s resident architect who got it started in the 1930s. Its native-stonework bridges and hemlock and rhododendron passageways make it the loveliest highway east of the Mississippi.

One morning, the tranquil light that fills the house while we have coffee suddenly went dark, then came back. We thought the power had blinked. After a minute, it happened again. Then we realized — a lonely car on the parkway had blocked the rising sun for an instant. Then another.

There was something miraculous about that alignment. The sun comes rolling in from the Outer Banks to the Blue Ridge Mountains, and winks at us in our little parkway house. Outside, I see the shadows of the parkway’s infrequent cars floating across the opposite ridge of cow pastures, the natural boundary of Virginia’s ancient valleys. For a moment, we’re smack on the American hinge.

The Tattoo Taboo
May 20, 2017

Whatever happened to the tattoo taboo?

Remember when only men who had spent hard time in prison or in the lower ranks of the military had tattoos? It was a class thing.

Now it’s an identity thing. Identity is a deep mystery, down there with the secrets of self and soul. Recently have we come to realize its force. Gender identity can’t be hidden away anymore. Our political identity has become more important than rational argument, and persuasion almost impossible against the power of identity.

I have ancestors who took genteel pride in a family crest from Scotland, with a lion rampant bearing a dagger and the Cumming motto: Courage.

They wouldn’t have besmirched the family honor with a tattoo (although an uncle overly enthusiastic about FDR’s National Recovery Administration had the blue eagle and “NRA — We do our part” tattooed on a forearm, just before the NRA was abolished as unconstitutional).

But I wonder what Major Cumming would’ve thought of our second son coming home as a Marine with a tattoo on his chest — of the Cumming heraldic crest. His older brother followed suit.

Even the flagrantly rich are tattooed now. Why else would L’Orléal Paris offer something called Infallible Total Cover, Nude Beige 303?

The thing about America that struck Gutzon Borglum was bigness. His parents had emigrated from little Denmark to the Wild West. So when their son John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum was born in Bear Lake, Idaho, in 1867, the little guy awoke under big skies in big empty lands. When he was seven, the Borglums moved to Nebraska, which was like Idaho that way.

It wasn’t just the land and sky, but something about the size of men’s character that seemed almost comically huge. It made America’s story like a big children’s book with full-page illustrations. Europe was always having little wars you had to act out with lots of little metal soldiers, and maybe a painted little Napoleon. America had just one great big war. It was full of giants like Lincoln, Grant, Lee, and Stonewall Jackson. It was a made-in-America war, and one that made America, the only American war that seemed to matter. True, America had been born in earlier wars. But even in those wars, all that you could imagine was the bigness of men like Washington and Jefferson, or that big painting by Benjamin West called “The Death of General Wolfe.”

Gurtzon Borglum studied painting, seriously, which meant moving to Europe. He studied art in Paris in the early 1890s, had paintings and sculptures shown in the best salons, then moved to London for success in royal circles. He absorbed the Arts and Crafts idea, the British movement that insisted that beauty is never produced by a machine but is almost always present in anything produced by hand in the traditional cottage ways.

He moved to New York, where he made the first piece of sculpture bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and sculpted the twelve apostles for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. “But he soon turned toward what his wife, Elizabeth Janes Putnam, a scholar in cuneiform and other Middle Eastern scripts, described as ‘the emotional value of volume,’” says his biography in the Encyclopedia Britannica. “Reviving the ancient Egyptian practice of carving gargantuan statues of political figures in natural formations of rock, he executed from a six-ton block of marble a colossal head of President Abraham Lincoln that was placed in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C.”

Yesterday, I discovered that Gutzon Borglum lived in 1924 and ‘25 in a beautiful house about a mile from where my wife and I just moved east of Atlanta. In the DeKalb History Center, which occupies the old stone courthouse in the Square in Decatur, Georgia, I saw an exhibit about the town where he lived, Avondale Estates. This was built as a kind of theme-park proto-suburb, a completely Tudor village modeled on Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon. (Another bit of history: The first Waffle House was there, now a Waffle House museum. Another bit of history: its ordinance prohibiting yard signs kept it the most white community around Atlanta, since “For Sale” signs were illegal.) The exhibit displayed an article about Gutzon Borglum from the Atlanta Constitution of September 26, 1915.

The article describes Borglum visiting the area several times and getting excited about his plans to carve figures of up to 50 feet height into Stone Mountain, about nine miles northeast of here. He said his colossus would “stand alone in memorial and monumental work in the world.” He had been invited by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and owners of Stone Mountain, newly collaborating as the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial association.

When I read this 1915 article on the wall of the Avondale Estates exhibit, I had just finished reading an opinion column in the New York Times that morning about this period, when President Woodrow Wilson was officially segregating the U.S. government and his administration was naming military bases after Confederate generals. Wilson, a religious Southerner who was president of Princeton University, fastened the myth of a “Lost Cause” of honorable Southern warriors into federal policy. “Why America Joined the Cult of the Confederacy,” the column in the Times, points out that this was also a time of community-wide spectacle lynching to terrorize Blacks throughout the Deep South.

The article in The Atlanta Constitution doesn’t say anything about race. It’s all about “patriotic women,” honor, nobility and “the heroism of the confederate cause.” And it seems that Gutzon Borglum, the Danish-American from out West, was fully taken in by this perspective. He even joined the Klan. To him, the Civil War was America’s Iliad, a heroic tragedy (having nothing to do with emancipation) worthy of grandiose art. The article quotes at length something he had written in an art magazine about memorializing Lincoln, which was underway in the construction of the Lincoln Memorial.

Borglum didn’t design the statue of a sitting Abraham Lincoln (which was made of Georgia marble), or its giant temple. But he described what they should express. “A simple, honest, sincere, inspired, true creature that knew the straight road and went right through and brushed the unimportant aside. You will pick the particular giants who built this country – Hamilton, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin. Those men will have an honorable place in that monument, and out of that group, going way back into the early eighteen hundreds, will arise this boy. We will assemble Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Seward, Stanton, and you will see him associated with them down through the friezes that will ornament this temple whenever it is built. . . .On the other side of the monument you will see struggling honestly pushing forward the southern cause, Lee, Stuart, Johnson, and then you will see them all united and the whole thing will close.”

This was how the Civil War looked to a certain artistic mind, as it looked at the time to an overwhelmingly white population outside the South, eager for healing, reunion and progress without having to face the meaning of the Great Migration out of the South. Borglum wasn’t deterred, if he even knew about it, by the “impressive services” held that Thanksgiving of 1915 atop Stone Mountain by a “new” secret organization calling itself the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (according to another Atlanta Constitution article on the wall of exhibit on Avondale Estates).

Borglum moved to Avondale Estates in 1924 to begin overseeing the carving of Confederate leaders on horseback, embossed on the side of the great granite outcropping. They remain there today. But the sculptor got only as far as the head of Robert E. Lee in 1925. That’s when Gutzon Borglum had a falling out with the United Daughters of the Confederacy and left. The split was said to be about money. I do wonder, though, if it was really about vision.The next sculptor re-designed the plan at a smaller scale, and blasted away Borglum’s head of Lee.

Borglum found another monumental project after that. He moved to South Dakota and created Mount Rushmore.